Searching the Past to Understand the Future

Sketches

02/14/2013

This would have been the second chapter of the 2010 kinda-sorta re-write of the project that never got off the ground. Note the rather intentional parallel structure to the first chapter. This, like yesterday's entry, is an unedited copy of something I wrote three-ish years ago.

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The last thing Eleanor Jane McIntire's father had said to her was, "When you get tired of this rebellion, you come on back home. We'll be waiting." He'd then tossed the last box in to the back of her rented truck and slammed the door shut.

Eleanor, or Ellie, as everyone called her, was a twenty-five-year old college graduate with dreams of a successful career in the big city and a past she was desperate to escape. She'd lived in a world dominated by men and wanted to know what it meant to be a woman for herself.

Her father wanted to be the image of the stern Southern gentleman. That's what the McIntires had been for as long as he knew, after all. He hadn't bothered to trace his lineage back any farther than a Colonel who served under Joe Johnston in the final days of the War of Northern Aggression. It was just as well, as the hard drinking Irish Catholic immgrants who had scraped together the money necessary to buy passage to the New World in the early 1800s wouldn't exactly have met his high standards. Either way, he expected his boys to grow up to be successful gentlemen as well and live up to the family name. He'd expected his daughter to grow up to be a beautiful debutant, even if they weren't part of the class that had such things, and settle down early to the life of the content homemaker. It was expected, it was right, at least in his world.

Her mother, meanwhile, had other plans. After giving birth to four boys and hoping for a girl the entire time, she'd named her only daughter after Eleanor Roosevelt. It was a little act of defiance. She couldn't have gotten away with naming the girl after Susan B. Anthony, but no one seemed to think twice about a First Lady. Even if she was a powerful, determined woman, she had gotten where she was by being a wife. Ellie's middle name, meanwhile, came from Jane Addams, the social work pioneer who had changed the landscape of Chicago forever. It was a good name, a strong name, one Ellie wore with pride.

Her father called her "Princess," a name Ellie pretended to enjoy but secretly simply endured. She had no urge to be a princess or carry the burden the name held. She didn't want to be daddy's little girl or simply Mrs. So-and-so. But as bad as Princess was, it beat by a country mile the name she wore through most of high school, the name that cause her to burn with shame every time she heard it. Easy Ellie, the boys at school called her.Even after her older brothers beat Tim Johnson so hard he ended up in the hospital the name stuck. It was a whisper, but it was still there. On one level, though, it had been a blessing. Her father had let her leave Atlanta to go away to college in Florida in the hopes that by the time she returned everyone would have forgotten about the whole thing.

She'd made the mistake of growing up tall, headstrong, and beautiful in a world where the girls were supposed to stay virtuous and the youthful indiscretions of the boys were dismissed with a knowing smile, a wink, and the words, "Boys will be boys." It was all her fault in the all-important court of public opinion. It was Ellie who had messed up. That was simply how it worked.

Strange, though, how she'd yearned to hear her father call her Princess after a while. But when Easy Ellie arrived, it seemed that Princess was gone forever. Still, her father had expected her to play the role as best she could from then on out. He'd ask her if she'd met anybody every time she called home from college. When she invariably said she hadn't he would sigh heavily and hand the phone to her mother.

Ellie stayed in college as long as she could, but eventually had to graduate and head back home. She'd taken a job teaching fourth graders at a nearby Christian school, but soon started to feel that her world was far too small. She began dreaming of a life lived according to her own rules and plans. One day she began daydreaming about the life of her middle namesake. Before she realized it, she was making plans to move to Chicago and make use of her double minor in social work and psychology and her major in education.

Ever since she'd left home for the second and, hopefully, last time, her father had not even made a pretense of caring what happened to her or expecting her to meet a man. Her mother always answered the phone and they played a game where both pretended her father had a legitimate reason he couldn't talk and that he sent his love. For the first three months after arriving in Chicago Ellie had cried herself to sleep.

She hadn't actually ended up in Chicago itself. She'd ended up forty miles away from the city in one of the many old river towns that dotted the area. It looked pretty much like every river town in the midwest. A long main street dotted with bars, restaurants, and cute little shops occupying hundred-year old brick and stone buildings dropped sharply towards the river, crossed it on an ornamented span, then climbed another hill on the other side. The farther up the hill out of the river valley or down along the river away from the town center, the more modern the construction became. The cute shops and riverfront parks gave way and were replaced with tract housing, strip malls, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Meijer, and Menards.

Still, Ellie loved her new home. Easy Ellie was a distant memory, Princess a non-factor. Even if she wasn't exactly the second coming of Jane Addams, she was happy. She had a full-time job working at a day care center and pouring her love in to the children of strangers. Three nights a week she worked at a little coffee shop called the Koffee Klatch. The regulars loved that she was always willing to offer a sympathetic ear and laugh at their lame jokes. And if some of the men seemed just a little too charmed by her southern accent and big, bright, green eyes, well, that was bound to happen sometimes.

And so Eleanor Jane McIntire went through her days outside Chicago, trying desperately to keep herself from realizing that none of her dreams were anywhere close to coming true.

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Whether or not this ends up going anywhere it's important. It marks a sea change in my perception of narrative structure and, possibly more importantly, a new understanding of the nature of the Self and the Other in both the story and reality. It's also the first time I fully realized the importance of empathy in the creation of a character.

Ellie started out as Jack's love interest and the woman to be won over as part of the overall course of the plot. Over the course of the various scenes I sketched out between coming up with the story in 2006 and the attempted re-write in 2010 she became a fully fleshed-out character with her own hopes, dreams, and voice. I realized that just leaving her as the woman who showed up and gave Jack's journey diminished her. More than that, it robbed her of her life and experience and all the things that brought her into Jack's life.

She was actually a far more interesting character than Jack. I think that's why I ended up keying in on names and the idea of namesakes. The idea of a girl growing up knowing she was expected to be a southern belle by her father but also knowing that she was named for Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams by a secretly rebelling mother fascinated me. She'd always had this sort of inherent agency, longing, and darkness that combined in a way that was far, far more interesting than Jack's rather static tale.

The problem was that I wrote myself into a corner by going with the parallel opening chapters. Jack had to be the main character, as the thing that drove the plot was something that happened to him. I thought about making a not-exactly-parallel structure, where we were introduced to both characters as co-equals, then each chapter was from an alternating perspective. That proved to be far, far too difficult to pull off while also preserving the actual narrative arc the story necessitated.

This, for the record, is why the 2010 re-write didn't get too far. I knew how to get through the first half-dozen chapters. After that I was more than a little lost.

02/13/2013

So I've had one of those stretches where I've lacked the time and energy to do much writing. As such, I think I shall begin my sketches idea.

I've had an idea sitting out there in various states of incompletion since early 2006. The idea still fascinates me and I love the characters involved. I've never actually been able to write the whole idea, though. I think there are two reasons for that.

First, this project, such as it is, really brought the origin of the sketches idea. I kept seeing scenes of interaction between the characters. I never really knew what happened between the scenes, though. Every time I tried to write their stories I got hung up on the events between the events.

Second, this project, such as it is, straddles the end of my Christianity like nothing else. It arrived during the period of great confusion that marked the beginning of the end. It's stuck with me ever since, with the characters remaining the same while their worlds have changed drastically.

In the spring of 2010 I tried to re-write the book. Well, I tried to write the book in a different way than I'd conceived of it the first time around. I didn't get very far. I'd still like to get somewhere with this one of these days, though.

Today and tomorrow I'll put up the first two chapters from that 2010 re-write. I might put some other stuff up later. This is unedited, for the record. I just pulled it directly out of the file in question.

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The last thing Jackson Paul Reed's father said to him was, "Don't ever let a woman get her claws in to you, kiddo. It just ain't worth it." He'd then thrown a pair of suitcases in to the trunk of his old brown Cutlass and disappeared in a cloud of thick, black exhaust smoke.

Jackson, or Jack, as his biological father had called him, was five years old. He stood in the middle of the street. Watching. Expecting the beat up Oldsmobile to return. It never did.

His father had left plenty of women in the past, but never a kid. He didn't know that a child didn't quite understand the dynamic of relationships between a woman and a man who was terrified of commitment. He didn't know that the kid could grow up blaming himself, could grow up insecure. Chances are, though, he wouldn't have cared. Such is the nature of selfishness.

To her credit, Jack's mother never once attempted to use her son as a stand-in for his deadbeat father. She'd set out as soon as possible in an attempt to find a real man, not the sort of self-focused rebel who stoked the imagination of an 18-year old girl from a small town, then left when things got tough, but the sort of man who was stable. She decided to do it right the second time around.

Tom Patterson was exactly the right sort of man. When he met Cindy Reed he was a thirty-two-year old widower looking for a new start. She was thirty. Jack was twelve.He'd arrived at the door to pick Cindy up on their first date with a bouquet of flowers for her and a Transformer action figure for Jack. Bumblebee.

Jack already had a Bumblebee, but he didn't care. All that mattered to him was that Tom had thought of him. He hadn't heard from his own father in seven years: no calls, no birthday presents, no Christmas cards. Nothing.

His mother had always called him Jackson. She'd named him after Jackson Pollock, hoped that such a name would give him creativity and genius. Tom called him Jack, and so did everyone else, except for about three months during his eighth grade year when all the boys at school called him Action Jackson after he told a whopper about getting his hand under Jennifer Dooley's shirt after a basketball game. She had actually let him kiss her. On the cheek. When word got out about his supposed adventures she'd met him at his locker, slapped him as hard as she could and called him a pervert. Even as a marginally aware thirteen-year old, Jack had been able to recognize the pain in her eyes. He'd vowed right then and there to never hurt another girl again. If anyone was going to get hurt in his future relationships, he decided, it was him.

The one thing nobody ever called Jack was "son." His biological father had always called him "kiddo" before he'd stopped calling him anything at all. His mother called him by name or referred to him as, "My boy." Sometimes, too, she called him "kiddo." Tom had wanted to call him son, but hadn't, even after the official adoption papers went through.

Tom had been hurt and never really understood why Jack refused to take his last name. It was no big deal, really, just the defiance of a teenager struggling for an identity, but Tom had never seen it that way. He had always wanted a son, and even if this wasn't how he'd envisioned getting one, he was determined to make the best of it. The fact that Jack wouldn't completely play along bugged him on some level. It wasn't supposed to work that way.

From the first time Cindy and Jack came in to his life, Tom had regarded his treatment of the boy as one of the most clear-cut aspects of his Christian duty. God had adopted Tom, after all, a metaphysical orphan who had only made it through the years following his first wife's tragic death in a car accident with God's help. He was bound and determined to make sure that Cindy and Jack knew the same God he did. His new wife adjusted to the concept well enough. She'd grown up in church, but really hadn't had time to go in years. She didn't so much leave as much as come up with other things to do with her time.

Jack didn't adjust to the church idea anywhere close to as well as his mother. Nobody really knew why, and Jack didn't say anything because he didn't want to cause any problems. But whenever someone referred to God as the Heavenly Father he winced just a little bit inside. His father had left in a cloud of smoke, after all. What was to stop this other, new father and his big, cosmic father from doing the exact same thing?

Eventually, though, things settled down in the Reed-Patterson household. Teenaged Jack never rebelled like the rest of his peers did. On one level he knew he had it pretty good. On another level he feared that it could disappear at any time. That little five-year old standing in the street trying to figure out what he'd done to chase his dad away had grown up to be a teenager who tried to figure out how to never chase anyone away.

He grew up handsome and awkward. Certain girls saw this and decided to take advantage of him. A succession of clingly bitches used him through high school and college, always taking and rarely giving back. He rarely broke up with a girlfriend even though he always knew within a few days or weeks that he should. Still, with each one he thought that he could help them or, at the very least, he didn't want to hurt them like he'd hurt Jennifer Dooley, like he'd been hurt. So a succession of girls had used him up, sucked him dry, then left him abandoned, hurt, confused, and calling them, weeping, in the middle of the night long after they'd gone on to their next mark.

After a while, Jack began to believe the last words of his father. He vowed at some point to never again let a woman get her claws in to him. It just wasn't worth it.

And so Jackson Paul Reed grew up a living embodiment of one of the great, unspoken truths. Although people rarely get what they actually deserve, most are spectacularly good at getting what they think they deserve.

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Looking back I can honestly say that I wouldn't change much about this chapter. I also absolutely wouldn't include it in anything as is, especially not as the introductory chapter to a book. It's just a bit on the nose. I guess I might have been fascinated with the notion of being on the nose at the time. I don't know.

It's also interesting to me how hard I was trying to flog the idea of god, family, and fathers. The idea of god as a father and, more importantly, as a deadbeat dad, was strong in my mind.